Preservation of Agriculture & Rural Open Space Functional Master Plan

“In the late 1950s, agrilcutural and open space preservation arose as a social and economic issue. The loss of agricultural and open space land, as a metropolitan planning issue, was expressed in terms of metropolitan needs and problems — the need to preserve open space and the diseconomy in building the costly infrastructure to serve scattered suburban development. This was at the heart of the issue in 1956 when Maryland, the first state to do so, enacted a law to provide preferential assessments to farmland in the hope of encouraging farmers not to sell their property to developers. Today, 42 states have enacted this type of legislation. Despite preferential assessment programs, however, development pressure has continued tp erode farmland…”